And The Bradbury Award Goes To...

The Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) have announced that the 2009 recipient of the Ray Bradbury Award will be Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly. The award is given for outstanding work in a dramatic medium.

Whedon is quoted as saying:

Like everyone who picks up a pen, I was a rabid Bradbury fan and as greatly influenced by him as any other writer I read. To receive the award named for him is an honor I'd not dreamed of. In my defense, it didn't exist back then. What did exist were the very lovely, very twisted and very human stories that warped my impressionable mind, and that I have tried, in whatever medium they will let me, to measure up to.

The full story is on the SWFA website, here. The award will be presented at the annual Nebula Awards bash in April.

Reviews of Bradbury's latest book We'll Always Have Paris are popping up around the place. I haven't had time to read the book yet myself, but I'm encouraged to see some positive press being received for this volume. See what the Los Angeles Times has to say here. And the Toledo Blade here.

Browsing Books

I found time to add to the main part of my site - I now have a page for We'll Always Have Paris, Bradbury's latest collection of new short stories. And thanks to HarperCollins, I can now offer a "browse inside" facility for this and some other books on my own site. Take a look below.

I also have a page for Masks, Gauntlet Press's latest effort in what can best described as Bradburyan archaeology. It's what they do best, in my view: digging into Bradbury's filing cabinets for abandoned works, finding the off-cuts and discards, and then attempting to make some sort of sense out of them. Of course, it's really the doing of Bradbury's master bibliographer Donn Albright, all watched by the scholarly eye of Eller and Touponce.

And now, have a good browse:

Slow Down, Mr B!

I never thought it would happen, but Ray Bradbury, nearly twice my age, is moving too fast for me to keep up with. I have two of his recent books in my "to read" pile, and he already has another two out. And another two scheduled for release. Not to mention the three stage plays already stacking up in California...

The two books already out - and not yet showing up elsewhere on my website - are Masks and We'll Always Have Paris.

Masks is an unfinished novel, originally written in the 1950s. It would have been Bradbury's second novel, after The Martian Chronicles. Gauntlet Press have now released the text for the first time, restored from various drafts and fragments located by Bradbury's bibliographer Donn Albright. From this description, you may gather that this isn't an ideal book for the newcomer to Bradbury; instead, it's more suited to the Bradbury completist, the reader who likes to see how Bradbury does it. The volume also contains a handful of previously unpublished short stories.

Ordering information for Masks is to be found on Gauntlet's site, here. If you are in the UK, you can save on shipping by buying from The Book Depository - they offer free delivery.

More suitable for the general reader is Bradbury's latest short story collection from Wm Morrow. We'll Always Have Paris is titled to reflect Bradbury's love affair with the French capital, a love he developed when consulting for Disney on Disneyland Paris. The French, of course, last year reciprocated the affection by awarding Bradbury the honour of Commander of Arts and Letters. Bradbury wears his medal to almost every public event he attends.











On stage, Bradbury is flourishing at present. The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit recently had a successful, if short, revival. According to the LA Times, the play "wears well". Read their review here.

Replacing Suit at the Fremont Centre Theatre, Pasadena, is Tobias Anderson in The Illustrated Bradbury. This is a one-man show in which Anderson adopts the guise of the Illustrated Man and other Bradbury characters. Information about the play can be found here (click on the "pick a show" dropdown, and select "Ray Bradbury Presents").

Running in parallel with Anderson's show is Falling Upwards, Bradbury's play based on his Irish experiences. Bradbury claims this production is the best he has ever seen of any of his plays, and who would dare to disagree? Full details about this production (at the El Portal Theatre, North Hollywood) can be found at www.raybradburysfallingupward.com

Finally, the annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts is nearly upon us. It's held in Florida every year, and is considered to be one of the leading academic events in the field. I'm pleased to have had a paper accepted, so I will be presenting "Ray Bradbury's Time Interventions", which looks at how Bradbury has made use of time in his fictions - time travel, youth vs age, encounters with the younger or older self, etc.